I am quite sure a lot of people already know the existence of the powerful JR Pass ticket for travelling within Japan with trains for a certain period of time. However, I am quite certain that significantly less people know about the existence of an “Air Pass”, the airplanes equivalent of the JR Pass. So here, I would like to share this new piece of information (which I just found out myself while preparing for my recent trip to Japan).

The Air Pass

Originally, our plan to go from Tokyo to Hakodate was to take the trains with the JR Pass. First, we would take the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Aomori and from there we would take another (slower) train to Hakodate. In total, the trip would take 6 hours (and would have cost around ¥20,000 (around €156) per person without the JR Pass). But then, upon browsing, I came accross the following page where I found a useful information about the existence of what was called the “Air Pass”. An Air Pass was basically like a JR Pass, terms and conditions-wise, but it was for a flight operated by the issuing airline. And from all the possible options, there was only one solution for our situation: the “ANA Experience Japan Fare” Air Pass which cost ¥10,000 per person one way (plus tax).

The tricky thing about this special fare was that it did not appear in the normal booking page (At the time of booking which was in February 2015. Lately, it seems that it does). And the booking page was just a normal booking page with a table showing the available flights, their schedules, and the ticket price (ranging from the lowest to the highest which were still available by the time of access). So for this reason I initially did not notice the existence of this “Air Pass” ticket.

So after reading that article in Japan-Guide, I googled “ANA Experience Japan Fare” which led me to a special page in ANA’s website where I could start browsing flights with this special fare! Yay! It was like party time! Hahaha😆 .

What I found amazing was that this special fare (which was lower than the lowest available price in the normal booking page) was available in ALL flights!😯 By this, in our case, ANA flew five direct flights from Tokyo-Haneda to Hakodate; and the best schedule for us was the NH 553 flight which left Haneda at 10:25 AM. In the normal booking page, this flight was the most expensive out of the five at the rate of ¥18,000 (around €134) for the cheapest one if I am not mistaken. But then, in the Air Pass page, all five flights could still be booked with this special Air Pass fare!!

In general, if you think about it, this ticket is very useful if you are about to fly long distance domestically within Japan.

The Air Pass versus Budget Airlines (Low Cost Carrier/LCC)

So the definition of “Air Pass” here is a little bit different from of “JR Pass”. In some sense, basically the “Air Pass” is just a special sub-class of economy class with some extra terms and conditions (which involve nationality and residency, haha😆 ).

One suggestion I can make regarding the “Air Pass” ticket for budget-conscious travellers is to compare the price with some LCCs serving the same route. Remember, the Air Pass is issued by Japan’s two biggest airlines, Japan Airlines (JAL) and All Nippon Airways (ANA), while there are more airlines in Japan, including some LCCs.

Peach, a Japanese LCC

In our case, the route of Tokyo-Haneda to Hakodate was only served by JAL and ANA per April 2015 so it was straight-forward. But some other more popular routes were served by some other LCCs as well. For instance, the second domestic flight we did in Japan was from Sapporo to Osaka. JAL and ANA offered their “Air Pass” on this route as well with the same price (¥10,000 + tax). However, Peach Aviation, a Japanese LCC, at that time offered a one way ticket with a basic price of around ¥5,950. After adding everything up (tax, luggage fee, seat selection, etc), I ended up with a total price of ¥8,470 per person. You see?

Requirement for The Air Pass

Information about the requirement and eligibility for an “Air Pass” ticket is available here so you can read it yourself. Basically you need to be a non-Japanese (or a Japanese who resides abroad) and you are in Japan for a short period of time (to prove this, you need to provide the information of your outbound flight from Japan while booking the ticket).

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Yeah, so I hope I have informed you enough about a possible way to travel within Japan😉 .

p.s: A little bit unrelated to the content of this post, so it turned out that my Haneda-Hakodate flight with ANA qualified for some frequent flyer points for my Garuda Miles membership, haha. This was so because of ANA and Garuda Indonesia’s cooperation. Unfortunately though, ANA did not havy any cooperation with Air France/KLM so consequently I could not transfer this miles to my Flying Blue account instead.

I bought our tickets of this ANA flight NH 553 from Tokyo-Haneda to Hakodate with the Air Pass special fare